Oslavia & Friuli Orange Wine: The Complete Guide to Italy's Most Revolutionary Wine Village
In a small village called Oslavia, on a hillside in the extreme northeast corner of Italy where the border with Slovenia runs through the middle of vineyards and families speak both Italian and Slovenian with equal fluency, a handful of winemakers quietly rebuilt the entire concept of white wine. They did it not with new technology or scientific breakthrough, but by going backwards — to fermentation methods that predate industrial winemaking by millennia, to the traditions of their grandparents, and ultimately to the 8,000-year wine culture of the Republic of Georgia. The wines they produced — orange, tannic, amber, extraordinary — were initially rejected by the Italian wine establishment, stripped of their DOC designation, and labelled as basic table wine unworthy of the regional identity they embodied. They are now recognised as among the most important and influential wines made anywhere in the world in the past fifty years.
This is the story of Oslavia, of Friuli orange wine, and of the producers — above all Stanko Radikon and Joško Gravner — who changed what we understand white wine to be. It is also a practical guide: the varieties, the production methods, the broader Friuli wine region context, and the specific bottles from our cellar that represent this tradition at its most accessible.
What Is Friuli Wine?
Friuli-Venezia Giulia is Italy's northeasternmost wine region, sharing borders with Austria to the north, Slovenia to the east, and the Adriatic Sea to the south. It is the most culturally complex and geographically diverse of Italy's wine regions: a mountainous north drops through hills and highlands to a coastal plain, and the cultural heritage mixes Italian, Slovenian, Austrian, and ancient Roman influences into something genuinely distinct from any other part of the country.
Friuli is primarily a white wine region. Indigenous varieties — Friulano (formerly Tocai Friulano), Ribolla Gialla, Malvasia Istriana, and Verduzzo — produce wines of specific character that exist nowhere else. International varieties, particularly Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay, and Sauvignon Blanc, were adopted in the 1970s and 1980s by Friulian producers who pioneered the modern Italian white wine style: cold-fermented, stainless-steel-aged, clean, precise, and technically impressive.
The irony of Friuli's wine history is that this modern technical style — which the rest of Italian white winemaking scrambled to imitate throughout the 1980s and 1990s — was subsequently abandoned by the region's most important producers, who discovered that the clean, technically flawless white wine they were making had become sterile and generic. The journey back toward fermentation with skin contact, natural yeast, and minimal intervention — a journey that Gravner and Radikon began in the late 1990s — is the story that defines Friuli's identity for the world of natural wine.
Oslavia — The Village That Changed Wine
Oslavia is not a large place. It is a village of a few hundred people, on a hillside in the Collio zone approximately five kilometres northeast of the town of Gorizia, right against the Slovenian border. The landscape is dramatic in a quiet way: rolling hills covered in vines, with Slovenia visible across a border that was, within living memory, one of the most heavily fortified frontiers in Europe. Many Oslavia families have Slavic surnames and speak Slovenian as naturally as Italian. The village's identity is genuinely cross-border in a way that only makes sense if you understand its history.
For most of the 20th century, Oslavia and the surrounding area changed nationality multiple times. It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, when Italy absorbed it after the First World War. After 1945, the area became one of the most contested zones in Europe: the Gorizia region was divided between Italy and Yugoslavia, with borders that cut through villages and even through individual properties. The Iron Curtain ran through these vineyards. For decades, the wine culture of Collio and the wine culture of what is now Slovenia developed in complete separation, despite being the same landscape, the same soil, the same grape varieties.
Slovenia's independence in 1991 and the opening of the border transformed this overnight. The vineyards that had been divided are now shared again. Families that had been separated for forty years resumed connections. And the winemaking culture of Oslavia — which had preserved certain traditional practices even through the modern era — began to reconnect with the broader Slavic and Georgian fermentation traditions that had been formally inaccessible for half a century.
The specific geography of Oslavia matters for understanding the wines. The hillside soils are a particular flysch — the Friulian ponca — a friable mixture of marl and sandstone that was deposited as ocean sediment and then compressed into the tilted, crumbling layers visible in the walls of any excavation in the zone. Ponca drains well, forcing vine roots deep; it contains minerals that translate into wine with a specific saline, mineral depth. The microclimate is moderated by both the Alps to the north and the Adriatic to the south, providing warmth in summer, cool nights, and the specific ventilation that allows grapes to ripen slowly and retain natural acidity. These are the conditions that produce Ribolla Gialla — the thick-skinned, naturally acidic white grape indigenous to the area — at its most compelling.
Stanko Radikon — Rebuilding Without the Rulebook
Stanko Radikon was already a respected Collio producer in the late 1980s and early 1990s, making technically accomplished white wines in the modern Friulian style: stainless steel, cold fermentation, early bottling, clean and aromatic. He was good at it. His wines sold. And then, around 1995, he began to feel that something essential was missing.
Radikon's dissatisfaction was not theoretical. He noticed that the white wines he was making — praised for their technical precision — were fundamentally similar to wines being made everywhere in northern Italy with the same techniques. The distinctiveness of his terroir, his old Ribolla Gialla vines, his specific ponca hillside: none of it was showing through the technical intervention that had standardised the style. The wines were clean. They were not specific.
His response was methodical and radical: he dismantled his winemaking approach almost entirely and rebuilt it from first principles. He began with maceration — leaving the skins in contact with the juice during fermentation, as red wines are made. First for days, then for weeks, then for months. He moved away from stainless steel and temperature control toward large old oak vessels. He stopped adding sulfur dioxide. He stopped filtering. He stopped fining.
The results were wines that the Italian wine establishment found essentially unacceptable. They were amber-orange in colour. They had tannins — actual, grippy, phenolic tannins from the grape skins — in what was supposed to be a white wine. They were not clean in the conventional sense; they had the complexity and occasional wildness of wines made from wild yeast with minimal intervention. They aged remarkably, developing over years and decades in ways that technically-made white wines simply could not. And they tasted, above all, of Oslavia: the ponca soil, the Ribolla Gialla vine, the specific vintage.
For years, Radikon's wines could not legally carry a DOC designation. The Collio DOC's rules required white wines to be a specific colour and style; skin-contact wines that darkened to amber fell outside the rules entirely. Radikon's response was characteristically uncompromising: he bottled his wines as Vino da Tavola — the lowest legal classification in Italian wine — with no vintage printed on the label. The vintage absence was deliberate: a statement that the wine was above and beyond the vintage variation that DOC regulations were designed to manage. His wines outlasted the system that rejected them.
Radikon died in 2016, and his estate is now run by his son Saša. The wines continue in exactly the same philosophy: Ribolla Gialla, Pinot Grigio (Sivi, meaning grey in Slovenian), and the Slatnik blend (Chardonnay and Friulano), all made with extended skin maceration, large old oak vessels, no additions, no filtration. The wines require patience — they are released after extended aging and benefit from years in the bottle after purchase — but they reward that patience with a complexity and specificity that nothing else in Italian wine quite matches.
Joško Gravner — From Napa Valley to Georgian Qvevri
If Radikon arrived at skin-contact winemaking through internal dissatisfaction with what he was making, Gravner's journey was more dramatic and more explicitly geographical. Joško Gravner is Oslavia's other foundational producer, and his property is close enough to Radikon's that the story — that you could carry a plate of freshly cooked polenta from one cellar to the other and still eat it piping hot — is simply a description of reality rather than romantic exaggeration.
Gravner's turning point arrived in 1987, when he visited the Napa Valley. He was already a successful and technically accomplished Friulian white wine producer, and Napa in 1987 was the most technically sophisticated wine region in the world. He expected to be inspired. Instead, he was unsettled. The wines he tasted in California — products of extraordinary technical precision — tasted, to Gravner, like his own wines. The same approach, the same results, the same standardisation. The specific geographic origin of the wine — Napa Valley versus Oslavia — was almost invisible behind the technique.
The visit crystallised a conviction that had been forming in Gravner for years: that technical winemaking was removing the thing that made wine valuable. He returned to Oslavia and spent the next decade gradually dismantling his approach, moving toward skin contact, natural yeast, and larger, older wood.
The definitive step came in 2000, when Gravner finally made his long-planned journey to Georgia — the Republic of Georgia, where wine has been made in buried clay vessels for 8,000 years. In Georgia's Kakheti region, he encountered the qvevri: large egg-shaped terracotta vessels buried in the earth, in which white wine is fermented on its skins for months and then aged underground. The wine that emerged from these vessels — amber, tannic, specific, extraordinary — was something Gravner had been searching for without knowing exactly what he was looking for.
He brought qvevri back to Oslavia. He had them buried in his cellar. He began fermenting his Ribolla Gialla in them, with the skins, for six months. He then moved the wine to large Slavonian oak barrels for a further six years of aging before release. The resulting wine — dark amber, extraordinarily complex, with tannins that rival serious red wines and a flavour profile that encompasses dried apricot, walnut, saffron, beeswax, and mineral depth — is unlike anything else in Italian wine.
Gravner's current production is almost entirely Ribolla Gialla, made in qvevri and released after seven or more years of aging. Quantities are tiny. The wines are expensive and sought-after. They are also, for many people, the definitive statement of what Friuli orange wine can achieve when the philosophy behind it is taken to its logical extreme.
The Oslavia Circle — Other Producers Who Followed
Radikon and Gravner were not alone in Oslavia, and their influence spread both within the village and beyond it. Dario Prinčič began making skin-contact wines in the 1990s and produces wines of intense, earthy, specific character that have developed a devoted international following. La Castellada, run by the Bensa brothers, produces skin-contact whites from the ponca hillsides that are among the most precise and age-worthy expressions of the style. A handful of younger producers established in the 2010s and 2020s have followed the path that Radikon and Gravner marked.
What distinguishes the Oslavia approach from other orange wine production elsewhere in the world is the specific combination of elements that come together here and nowhere else: the ponca soil, the Ribolla Gialla variety with its thick skins and naturally high acidity, the long aging in large old wood, the proximity to both the Georgian tradition that Gravner brought back and the Slovenian natural wine culture that crosses the border freely. The wines of Oslavia have a specific personality — structured, mineral, long, demanding of time in both fermentation and bottle — that is not replicated by skin-contact wines made anywhere else.
The Broader Friuli Wine Region
Collio — the hills of Oslavia
Collio (full name: Collio Goriziano) is the hilly zone immediately east of Gorizia, running along the Slovenian border. This is the most prestigious white wine zone in Friuli and the home of both the modern orange wine movement and some of the region's finest conventional whites. The ponca soils of the Collio slopes produce wines of unusual mineral depth and age-worthiness from varieties including Friulano, Malvasia Istriana, Ribolla Gialla, and Sauvignon Blanc. Oslavia is a specific village within the Collio DOC; the wines of Oslavia tend to be more structured and phenolic than those from other parts of Collio, reflecting the specific mesoclimate and the concentration of skin-contact producers.
Isonzo — the river plain
The Friuli Isonzo DOC occupies the flat alluvial plain south of Gorizia, along the Isonzo river. The soils here are gravel and clay rather than ponca, and the wines tend to be fruitier and more immediately approachable than Collio wines. The zone produces both white and red wines of genuine quality; Merlot achieves a specific earthy, mineral character in the Isonzo zone that is distinct from Merlot grown elsewhere.
Colli Orientali del Friuli — the eastern hills
The Colli Orientali del Friuli DOC covers the hills east and northeast of Udine, and is Friuli's most varied zone in terms of both grape varieties and wine styles. Indigenous red varieties including Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso and Schioppettino produce serious, age-worthy reds of considerable interest. The zone also contains the Ramandolo and Cialla sub-zones with DOCG status for specific wine styles.
Friuli Grave — the broad plain
Friuli Grave is the largest DOC in the region, covering a broad area of gravelly plains west of Udine. Production here is more commercial in character, with higher yields and more immediately accessible wines. The zone is responsible for much of the volume production that drives Friuli's commercial export success.
The Grape Varieties of Friuli Orange Wine
Ribolla Gialla — the Oslavia grape
Ribolla Gialla is the indigenous Friulian white grape most closely associated with the orange wine tradition of Oslavia. Also grown across the border in Slovenia (where it is called Rebula), the Collio and Oslavia hillsides are its home. The variety has thick skins — ideal for extended maceration, which extracts colour, tannins, and complex aromatic compounds. The skins are also high in malic acid, contributing to the wine's naturally high acidity and its capacity to age. Natural acidity, thick skins, and the specific mineral character of the ponca soil combine to make Ribolla Gialla the ideal vehicle for the Oslavia approach.
In its skin-contact expression, Ribolla Gialla from Oslavia produces wines of extraordinary complexity: amber to deep golden in colour, with aromatics including dried apricot, orange peel, chamomile, beeswax, white tea, walnut, and a persistent saline mineral note from the ponca soil. The palate is tannic and structured, with very high natural acidity that gives the wines exceptional aging potential. Young Ribolla Gialla from Oslavia may be demanding; with five to ten years of bottle age, it becomes one of the most complex and rewarding whites in Italy.
Friulano (Tocai) — the indigenous workhorse
Friulano is the signature white grape of Friuli as a whole, found across all zones. Until 2007 it was called Tocai Friulano, but an EU ruling required the name change. Friulano produces wines of characteristic almond bitterness and floral aromatics — white flowers, fennel, citrus — with medium body and a gentle bitterness on the finish. In its conventional expression, it is fresh and immediately delightful. With skin contact, as in Radikon's Slatnik blend, it contributes aromatic freshness and structural acidity to the extended-maceration style.
Pinot Grigio Ramato — the copper-hued original
Before the modern orange wine movement, there was Ramato — the traditional style of Friulian Pinot Grigio made with brief skin maceration that produced a copper-hued wine of unusual character. Ramato (from rame, copper in Italian) predates the modern pale Pinot Grigio style and represents the indigenous Friulian approach to a variety that now dominates global production in a completely different form. At its best, Ramato has a copper-orange colour, aromatic complexity (dried rose, orange peel, mineral), and a textural richness entirely absent from the commercial pale version. Radikon's Sivi — from sivi, meaning grey or grey-pink in Slovenian — is the most important modern expression of this tradition.
Malvasia Istriana — the aromatic partner
Malvasia Istriana is the Friulian expression of the broad Malvasia family — more delicate, more floral, and more mineral than southern Italian or Spanish expressions. In the Collio and Carso zones, Malvasia Istriana produces wines of perfumed freshness in conventional style; with skin contact, it becomes richer and more textured while retaining its characteristic aromatic elegance.
How Oslavia Orange Wine Is Made
Harvest: Grapes are harvested late by conventional standards — Ribolla Gialla in Oslavia is often picked in October, well after the standard harvest window for white wines in northern Italy. Late harvesting allows complete phenolic ripeness in the thick skins, essential for the long maceration that follows.
Maceration: Unlike brief macerations that produce lighter orange wines, the Oslavia producers typically macerate for weeks or months. Radikon's macerations range from 2 to 4 months depending on the variety. Gravner macerates his Ribolla in qvevri for approximately 6 months. This extended contact extracts not just colour and tannin but the full phenolic and aromatic potential of the skins, including compounds only released with very long skin contact that contribute to the wines' extraordinary complexity and longevity.
Vessels: Large old Slavonian oak casks (botti) are the standard aging vessel for Radikon; Gravner uses qvevri for fermentation and maceration, then transfers to large old oak for aging. Neither uses new French barriques. The old neutral vessels allow the wine to develop slowly without the interference of new wood.
Aging: Oslavia orange wines age for years before release. Radikon typically releases wines four to six years after the vintage; Gravner's Ribolla is not released until seven or more years after harvest. This extended aging is not merely stylistic: the tannic structure combined with very high natural acidity means that young release would present wines that are dense and unresolved.
No additions, no filtration: All serious Oslavia producers add no sulfur dioxide, no commercial yeast, no tartaric acid, no fining agents. The wines are not filtered. What is in the bottle is the direct result of what happened in the vineyard and the cellar — nothing more.
What Does Friuli Orange Wine Taste Like?
The colour of Oslavia orange wine is typically deep amber to copper, depending on the grape variety and the length of maceration. Ribolla Gialla tends toward amber-gold; Pinot Grigio toward copper. The visual effect of pouring a glass of Radikon Sivi — the colour of strong tea, with a slight turbidity from the lack of filtration — is itself a statement of intent.
On the nose: dried apricot, orange peel, chamomile, white flowers, beeswax, almond, walnut, dried herbs. Older wines develop additional notes of honey, oxidative complexity (deliberate and controlled, entirely different from a flawed oxidised wine), and the specific mineral character of the ponca soil — a saline, slightly chalky depth that provides the longest, most distinctive dimension of the wine's aromatic profile.
On the palate: firm tannins from the skin contact, high natural acidity, full body from the long maceration and extended pre-release aging, and extraordinary length. These are wines that do not finish in seconds — a well-made Radikon or Gravner lingers for minutes, evolving as the tannins interact with the acidity and the mineral depth emerges on the finish.
For wine drinkers who have only experienced brief or moderate-maceration orange wines, the first encounter with a serious Oslavia wine can be challenging. The tannins are real. The structure is demanding. The wine does not flatter immediately. But with food, or with time in the glass, or with a few more encounters, the complexity resolves and the reason for all that patience becomes clear: there is nothing else that tastes like this.
How to Serve and Pair Friuli Orange Wine
Serve Oslavia orange wine at 14°C to 16°C — warmer than conventional white wine. The tannin and structure need additional temperature to open up; too cold, and the wine will seem tight and dry without the aromatic complexity that opens with warmth. Open the bottle at least one hour before serving; for wines over ten years old, consider decanting briefly into a carafe. The wines evolve dramatically with air.
Oslavia orange wine is extraordinarily versatile with food precisely because the tannin and acidity combination handles dishes that defeat most conventional white wines. Classic pairings: aged hard cheese (Montasio, Frico, Parmigiano-Reggiano) whose crystalline savoury complexity mirrors the wine's own complexity. Charcuterie, particularly Friulian prosciutto di San Daniele, culatello, and speck. Rich, fatty, savoury dishes: roast pork, duck, game birds. Fermented, umami-rich foods: aged cheeses, dried mushrooms, cured fish. Spiced dishes from South Asian and Southeast Asian cuisines — the tannin and acidity handle spice in ways that conventional white wines cannot.
The DOC Rebellion and What It Tells You
The institutional rejection of Oslavia wines by Italy's wine classification system illuminates something important about the wines and the producers who make them. For most of the 2000s and into the 2010s, Radikon and Gravner could not legally label their wines as Collio DOC. The regulations specified colour, grape variety percentages, and stylistic parameters; skin-contact wines that emerged amber and tannic fell outside every relevant regulation. The wines that were, by any reasonable measure, the most internationally significant wines emerging from the Collio were required to be labelled as Vino da Tavola — Italian for table wine, the classification used for cheap bulk wine.
Radikon's response was the no-vintage bottle — he removed the vintage year from his labels entirely. Gravner simply accepted the table wine designation and sold his extraordinary amber Ribolla as official table wine for years. Both producers continued to attract international attention and critical acclaim despite — in some cases because of — the institutional rejection of their work. A new Collio orange wine DOC is currently being defined that would accommodate skin-contact production.
This story reflects the essential character of the Oslavia producers: people who care more about the wine than the label, who chose to make something specific and honest at the cost of institutional recognition, and who were right to do so. Their wines outlasted the regulations that rejected them.
From Our Friuli Cellar
The skin-contact Pinot Grigio — Radikon's most provocative wine
Radikon Sivi 2022 · Friuli-Venezia Giulia (Oslavia, Collio) · $54
"Sivi" means grey or grey-pink in Slovenian — a reference to the grey-pink skin of Pinot Grigio, which when left in contact with the juice produces a wine of copper-amber colour rather than the pale straw of commercial Pinot Grigio. The 2022 Sivi is extended maceration, no SO₂, no filtration — the Radikon philosophy applied to the grape that most people associate with something entirely different. The result forces a rethinking of what Pinot Grigio actually is: aromatic, complex, tannic, mineral, completely unlike anything the variety produces when fermented in stainless steel without skin contact. This is one of the most historically significant natural wines in our range — a wine from the estate of one of the two people most responsible for the modern orange wine movement, made in exactly the way Stanko Radikon developed in the late 1990s.
The blend — Radikon's broadest expression
Radikon Slatnik 2022 · Friuli-Venezia Giulia (Oslavia) · $54
The Slatnik blends Chardonnay and Tocai Friulano — two varieties that in Radikon's hands, over decades of extended-maceration winemaking, have become something of their own. The Chardonnay provides body and weight; the Friulano provides aromatic freshness and the characteristic almond bitterness of the variety. Extended maceration, large old oak, no additions, no filtration. Where the Sivi is all precision and mineral structure, the Slatnik is broader and more generous — an introduction to the Radikon style that offers slightly more immediate fruit alongside the skin-contact complexity.
Natural red from the Isonzo plain
Paraschos Merlot 2018 · Friuli (Isonzo) · $33
Evidence that the minimal-intervention philosophy of Friuli extends beyond the Collio orange wine tradition. Paraschos is based in the Friuli Isonzo DOC, in the alluvial plain south of Gorizia, and makes natural red wine from Merlot with the same approach that characterises the region's best producers: organic farming, natural yeast, no additions, no filtration. The result is a Merlot of genuine Friulian character — earthy, mineral, specific — that demonstrates how the Friulian terroir expresses itself differently in the plain than in the Oslavia hills.
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Frequently Asked Questions About Friuli Orange Wine
What is Friuli wine?
Friuli wine refers to wine from Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy's northeasternmost wine region bordering Austria and Slovenia. Friuli is primarily a white wine region producing wines from indigenous varieties including Friulano, Ribolla Gialla, and Malvasia Istriana. It is most famous internationally for the orange wine revolution that began in the village of Oslavia in the late 1990s, led by producers Stanko Radikon and Joško Gravner, and for the modern Italian white wine style pioneered here in the 1970s and 1980s.
What is Oslavia wine?
Oslavia is a small village in the Collio zone of Friuli, near the Slovenian border, where Stanko Radikon and Joško Gravner developed the modern orange wine approach in the late 1990s. Oslavia wine refers to the extended skin-contact white wines — primarily from Ribolla Gialla, Pinot Grigio, and Friulano — made with very long macerations (weeks to months), natural yeast, large old oak aging, no additions, and no filtration. These wines are amber to copper in colour, tannic, complex, and built for long aging. They represent the most important development in Italian white wine in the past half century.
What is Ribolla Gialla wine?
Ribolla Gialla is an indigenous white grape variety of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, grown primarily in the Collio zone and across the border in Slovenia (where it is called Rebula). It has thick skins ideal for extended maceration and naturally high acidity that makes it excellent for long aging. In conventional style, it produces floral, citrusy, medium-bodied whites. In the skin-contact expression pioneered by Oslavia producers, Ribolla Gialla produces amber, tannic, complex wines of extraordinary age-worthiness — the variety most closely identified with the Friuli orange wine tradition.
What did Radikon and Gravner do differently?
Both Stanko Radikon and Joško Gravner began as conventional Friulian white wine producers before becoming disillusioned with the standardised technical approach that had come to dominate Italian white wine. In the 1990s, both independently began fermenting white grapes with extended skin contact. Gravner additionally made a pivotal trip to Georgia in 2000, where he encountered the qvevri tradition of fermenting and aging wine in buried clay vessels, and brought qvevri back to his Oslavia cellar. Both also eliminated all additions and filtration. Their wines were rejected by the Italian DOC system but recognised internationally as among the most significant wines being made anywhere in the world.
How long should you age Friuli orange wine?
Oslavia orange wines from Radikon and Gravner are already aged for multiple years before release — typically four to seven years from the vintage. After purchase, they can continue to age for a decade or more. Most serious Oslavia orange wine is at its best between 8 and 20 years from the vintage, though the very best bottles can age for 30 years or more. Drinking these wines young — even young by the time they reach you after pre-release aging — means drinking them before their full complexity has developed.
How do you serve Friuli orange wine?
Serve at 14°C to 16°C — warmer than conventional white wine. Open at least one hour before serving, or decant briefly and return to the bottle. The wines close on opening and need air to show their complexity. Use a large-bowled red wine glass rather than a white wine glass, to give the aromatics room to develop.
What food goes with Friuli orange wine?
Friuli orange wine pairs exceptionally well with aged hard cheeses (Montasio, Parmigiano-Reggiano, aged Frico), prosciutto and cured meats, rich meat dishes (roast pork, duck, game), fermented and umami-rich foods, and spiced cuisines from South Asia and Southeast Asia. The tannin and high acidity make it more versatile with rich food than conventional white wines. Avoid delicate, light dishes where the wine's tannin will overwhelm.
Why was Oslavia wine labelled as table wine?
The Collio DOC regulations specified that white wines must conform to certain colour, style, and production parameters. The extended skin-contact wines of Oslavia — amber, tannic, made with long maceration — did not conform and could not legally carry the Collio DOC designation. Producers including Radikon were required to label their wines as Vino da Tavola (table wine), the lowest Italian classification. Radikon responded by also removing the vintage year from his labels. A new Collio orange wine DOC is now being defined.
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